Show HN: I made a website for you to travel the world in first-person POV

https://www.explordle.com/map/wor

by eddieweng • 4 years ago

390 86 4 years ago

explordle.com

nittanymount2• 4 years ago

nice, where did you get the videos from?

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

The videos are all hosted on youtube.

blackmoon42• 4 years ago

Which explains how I can cheat sometimes... When I go to the lockscreen on my phone I can see the title of the video.

betterburnout• 4 years ago

I have tried it three times and I find this way of teleporting very pleasant. I am particularly bad in geography, but it seemed to me that the places of some videos were sometimes particularly easy to identify. It's good when you feel lost. And the three times around the twenty videos I had a bug (with Firefox). And lost all my progress.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Will look into the bug. Thank you for the feedback!

noduerme• 4 years ago

This is so awesome! I love it. Completely enchanting. I did 100 and got 89 right; and saw a few places I had lived =)

I had a momentary flashback to playing Carmen Sandiego when I was a kid. It think this would be a great educational tool.

Some thoughts (in no particular order)...

* I had one repeat video (which I had gotten wrong the first time), and two videos of the Brandenburger Tor (Berlin).

* It's interesting how many of them have flags in the shot - were the shots selected this way on purpose? It made me think how often there are flags everywhere that we barely notice. That plus the writing system, plus which side of the road people are driving on, makes some of them fairly easy. I imagine you could make a more difficult level if you wanted to, just by increasing the number of multiple choice answers or making more of them be from the same country or region.

* I wish there was a way to share your score with friends.

Great project!

nopenopenopeno• 4 years ago

I thought 60/100 was good but I have never left the USA.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

* The videos will not show up again only if you guess it right

* Yes the difficulty of the game is what I'm working on next

* Sharing score with friends: I'm thinking of a daily question set and a sharable format like wordle :P

Glad you like it and thank you for your feedback!

rapjr9• 4 years ago

If you don't guess will the videos show up again and again? I'm not interested in the guessing game aspect, I just want to watch the videos.

meesterdude• 4 years ago

cool site, confusing UX.

yesenadam2• 4 years ago

At first I thought it was offering me a choice between 4 random places to go next. That would also be awesome.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Thank you for the feedback, will fix.

nittanymount2• 4 years ago

thought that way too :-)

samieljabali• 4 years ago

When the app is playing audio & titles visible read:

- "unmuted" "visible"

instead of

- "mute", "hide".

Button/label showing current state of the app is better than how the state will change via the button.

yesenadam2• 4 years ago

Thank you, this is great! One thing - I'm not in USA, and only people in USA, I guess, know those two-letter state abbreviations. I got one where I had to choose based on two two-letter codes I didn't know. Using the whole state name would make it more international.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Got it, will fix this. Thanks for your feedback!

wccrawford• 4 years ago

Even for those of us in the US, this can be confusing. I had to memorize those codes a long time ago, but I haven't really used most of them in decades. For example, MI. Is that Michigan, Missouri, or Mississippi? (It's Michigan.) MS? Mississippi. MO is Missouri, which isn't intuitive unless you already know the other 2 and realize there isn't a lot of other letters they could use.

So yeah, full names is better. :)

ortusdux• 4 years ago

Have you seen the stand-up Gary Gulman's routine about the group that choose the abbreviations? It's a masterclass in comedic storytelling.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dLECCmKnrys

polishdude20• 4 years ago

This is awesome thanks! One thing I noticed is it's really US centric. Usually in my choices I got 4 USA locations and one non US place.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

More places will be added, thank you for the feedback!

nojs• 4 years ago

This is amazing! Really fun. I would also love to see a more even distribution geographically, it’s currently very US/Europe/South American centric.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

More places will be added, thank you for the feedback!

ambrose2• 4 years ago

This is one of my favorite things I’ve seen on the internet in a while. Just so awesome. One thing I think that might be improved would be to prevent some situations where for example I was given as choices something like China, Vietnam, County A in West Virginia, County B in West Virginia. It clearly was in West Virginia (too easy), but which county was too difficult.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Glad you like it! I'll try to tune the difficulty of the game.

91dylwyn2• 4 years ago

This is pretty fascinating!!

91dylwyn2• 4 years ago

Maybe you could you make it so people can add a place. I guess upload to youtube, geo-tag it. It would be fun to get to add your place to the game.

I would like to try with a VR headset

Leftium• 4 years ago

On the [home page], there is a link to a [submission form].

[home page]: https://www.explordle.com/

[submission form]: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfD6VZ0xPYcqk-oEAD6...

pcthrowaway• 4 years ago

This is amazing. I think it'll make a good party game also, especially if the attendees are well-traveled or international.

edit: Would be amazing if you added a competitive mode also, where two or more parties would get the same series of videos (randomly generated from a unique URL or something). And see who can get the most points out of 100 or so. Even better of the options are labeled A-D and randomized so groups in the same room can discuss which one they want to pick without leaking information

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Team game is a good idea, will think about this.

em-bee• 4 years ago

i love the idea. unfortunately probably due to my slow connection i get an extremely low resolution on the video making it very difficult to recognize any details because everything looks blurry. i'd rather have less or slower video but at a higher resolution. 360p at least. 480p would be better.

also, please check the browser language. due to my location i get city names in a language i can't read.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Thank you for the feedback! The game now checks browser language and redirects accordingly.

dividuum• 4 years ago

Neat. The presence of flags makes it almost too easy :-)

It seems pretty similar to https://virtualvacation.us/guess (which I just run across earlier today), except you're asked to click on a map to solve instead of using multiple choice.

heystefan• 4 years ago

FFS this is so addictive.

_puk• 4 years ago

This is awesome. Wasted far too much time on it already!

Tried clicking source and got an error:

https://www.explordle.comhttps//www.youtube.com/watch?v=qArF... not found

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Got it, will fix. Thank you for the feedback!

Mike-br• 4 years ago

I wasted 20 minutes on it. Cool!

billylo• 4 years ago

Well done... I can see a multi-user competition mode too (e.g. Kahoot!)

Good ice-breaker too.

tetraodonpuffer• 4 years ago

I often watch POV walking/biking videos when working out indoors (rambalac for Japan, prowalk tours for Italy/Europe, watched walker for London, …) and thanks to your site I’ve found a couple more channels I was not aware of: could you maybe have a page where you list all the channels you are using (with maybe the amount of videos from each)?

From a gaming standpoint maybe I would show the source button only after the user has made a guess, as well as having an auto play button that can be disabled in case the user just wants to play random POV videos as screensaver or keep watching for a while after guessing.

intrasight• 4 years ago

Cool, but... Where am I? I see a video, and some buttons for other locations. But it doesn't show what I am looking at in the current video. Is it a puzzle? You have to figure that out? If so, please say that somewhere.

beeboop2• 4 years ago

Yes, the idea is to guess where you are. It keeps track how many you get right.

jdhzzz• 4 years ago

It took me a while to pick up on that. I first thought I was choosing where to go next. I then wasted a bunch of time on it. Fun.

abalaji• 4 years ago

This is really neat. I think if you had the geoguesser style of map or head-to-head competitions, it could really take off in the twitch streaming world.

nickthegreek• 4 years ago

skip button isnt working for me in firefox 99.0

beeboop2• 4 years ago

Working for me in 99.0 on macos

gmarcus• 4 years ago

Addictive! Would make for a great TV app (iOS/Android developer here). Multi-player each with their own controller to collect answers and reveal the winners.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Haha! Great idea! Thank you for the feedback, I'll try to figure out how to write TV app when there's more time.

ezekg• 4 years ago

I watched somebody walk around in the rain at night for 10 mins before realizing this is Wordle-but-with-videos. Very peaceful.

cercatrova• 4 years ago

Reminds me a lot of GeoGuessr [0], particularly the videos that top competitors make, such as Tom Davies who goes by the moniker GeoWizard [1].

[0] https://www.geoguessr.com

[1] https://www.youtube.com/c/GeoWizard

brennopost• 4 years ago

Also City Guesser [0], which has similar POV video gameplay.

[0] https://virtualvacation.us/guess

matthewhartmans• 4 years ago

This is really cool!

I got carried away playing, was super fun. Nice one OP!

sinuhe69• 4 years ago

I got 32 out of 33 :) The scripts, weather and the people are the telltale clues.

cyxxon• 4 years ago

Yeah, I had a similar score. It is way too easy, I'd say. I often had video segments that gave the answer away: a skyline with skyscrapers, and a list with one mega city and three random unknown towns, I had the Eiffel tower, and several signs with the location name. I know that the last can't be filtered out, but maybe the selection of the three wrong choices needs to be made a bit more... similar?

Good work otherwise though, very nice!

perfopt• 4 years ago

When I click on a city it shows videos from a different city. On firefox

catsarebetter• 4 years ago

Beyond cool, thanks for this

globalise83• 4 years ago

This is perfect for a distributed team game via Zoom - if you can find a way to facilitate group guessing via mobile phone while the videos are shown on a video conferencing screen then I believe you have a hit on your hands.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Team game...good idea, will think about this.

mbustamanter• 4 years ago

Awesome work! First time I played I got 50/55, generally I look for signs on the street, apart from the architecture of the place, how the people look and what language they speak. Naturally the US seems to be overrepresented, but on 4 of the questions I got wrong I was undecided between two american counties.

superasn• 4 years ago

This would be super incredible inside a vr headset like quest. But i think the video resolution must be scaled a lot like 4k at least, 8k preferably for it be meaningful.

I actually did have an app that was kind of similar and it used to make you exercise in streets of paris, etc in first-person pov but the video resolution was so bad it just didn't work. But i am sure there will be a huge demand for this in vr as it gets more popular.

slfnflctd• 4 years ago

This kind of video content in VR is of almost no interest to me as long as it remains 'flat' (2D in wraparound)-- once you've seen videos in true stereoscopic 3D, everything else pales in comparison. That may not be an issue for most people, but I know I'm not the only one. It kinda seems like most of the reason to use a VR headset instead of just a wide monitor in the first place.

I'm sure it's possible to do some kind of software based interpolation/upscaling (not sure what term to use here) to convert 2D to 3D, but I don't know how involved that process would be.

2OEH8eoCRo0• 4 years ago

This is lovely. Thanks for sharing!

program• 4 years ago

It should be interesting to have a seed system so that you can challenge other people.

lavela• 4 years ago

In the spirit of 'travel the world' and based on how I interpreted the city choice at first, I'd love for there to be a mode where you don't take a quiz but just choose where you go next.

nathancahill• 4 years ago

Pretty easy. I'd would try adding a hard mode where the 3 wrong cities are geographically close to the correct city. So guessing "Asia" isn't enough to guess correctly.

Labo333• 4 years ago

Could you add a setting to disable "autoskip"?

hobo_mark• 4 years ago

Love this kind of walking around videos (I watch them in an old VR headset when I cannot fall asleep). I see it uses videos from YouTube, are they collected in a playlist somewhere? :)

This is my favorite channel on this subject https://www.youtube.com/c/rambalac

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Glad you like the game and thank you for the source :) I'll try to add them into the game.

lom• 4 years ago

Great game! That was really fun!

I would love to have the ability to copy-paste the results of how wrong or right I was after a set amount of games (like wordle)

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Working on it!

mncharity• 4 years ago

I enjoy such videos, but find them problematic. I'd like to filter by bouncing-camera style vs no-bounce, or perhaps on degree of bounce. Avoiding-pan style vs slow pan vs pan vs swivel to interesting things. Interesting things can be fun, but... "fun, fun, fun, fun, zap ouch! - now I get to be queasy for an hour". So perhaps intra-video filtering, like automatic blackouts, or vr-like "given the current angular velocity, we'll gray out much of the display, narrowing the field of view to a smaller circle, to avoid sickness"? Can a plug-in see an embedded video to do optical flow? Perhaps a site already curating such videos might value-add some image analysis? Are there popular channels with moments problematic for some viewers, perhaps creating a persistent niche for a mediating middleman?

martopix• 4 years ago

Very nice! Just one comment: why do I have to wait 5 seconds? Sometimes the answer is clear before the end of this time.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Well, Explordle is designed to be a slow paced, casual game. Hope you like it!

ramesh31• 4 years ago

Never ever ever ever initiate audio on the web without positive intent from the user.

sanitycheck• 4 years ago

Very good! I like this a lot, my wife and I just spent 20 mins on it.

Thoughts:

There is too much USA, for people outside the USA. Multiple choice between different counties in the same US state becomes just guesswork, maybe that situation could be prevented. (Also, non-Americans don't know the abbreviations for most US states.)

It's too easy when the choices are too geographically diverse. Maybe the 'wrong' options could be selected based on a min + max distance from the location in the video, say 500km to 5000km.

Needs a pause button so I don't have to close the tab, or if there is one it needs to be more prominent.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Hello, glad you guys like it! I've changed the pause/play mechanism of the game. Now when the tab is not focused, it will automatically pause the video. Is this good enough for you?

a9h74j• 4 years ago

I really like it. In principle it could be like a window kept open "into the world" while working.

Given the need to interact with your site to change scenes, and that I was trying to work in another window, the constant pausing today (when another window had focus but the POV tab was still visible in its window) was a bit bothersome (clicking again to restart would change the video as well IIRC). I don't know if a setting option would help or distract.

For idle viewing, I wish there were a slide-show option to periodically change videos automatically, and also a "just subtitle country" option especially for relatives who have never been overseas from US, and could learn without extra mental overhead being forced to guess.

stevematzal• 4 years ago

I liked it! Similar to GeoGuessr. Logged in to give an upvote.

eddieweng18• 4 years ago

Thank you :D

HanClinto• 4 years ago

This was a lot of fun, thank you!

I especially appreciate the "Stay" button.

Really clean implementation -- nicely done!

skywal_l• 4 years ago

The cherry blossom video is incredible.

FFRefresh• 4 years ago

This is fantastic, well done!

bspear• 4 years ago

Can see teams doing this as a fun icebreaker

bookreturn• 4 years ago

I enjoyed watching this narrative-free stroll in exotic locales. I think this would be a great site to relax to before bed. Please add more places :)

tradesurplus• 4 years ago

Really cool experience and lots of fun while training/testing one's powers of observation and deduction. Did you harvest the clips manually?

animal531• 4 years ago

Very neat, it reminded me of the below link, which shows videos of driving through cities, while playing you a matching radio station from the area. https://driveandlisten.herokuapp.com/

nonick• 4 years ago

I've accidentally discovered that adjusting the sound volume from the keyboard exposes the title of the video in the popup: https://imgur.com/gallery/K3oUFlb

Show HN: I made a website for you to travel the world in first-person POV

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